Labor market institutions and income inequality: An empirical exploration

This paper presents evidence on the impact of labor regulations on income inequality using a recently published database on labor institutions and outcomes as well as different panel data analysis techniques for a large sample of countries for 1970-2000. When applying our preferred technique we find that both de jure and de facto regulations improve the distribution of income although the former appear to be non-robustly associated with improving income inequality. This result partly reflects the fact that regulations are endogenous and, more interestingly, that different regulation yield distinct effects.